Burgess Shale Worm Provides Crucial Missing Link

Canada’s 505 million year-old Burgess Shale fossil beds, located in Yoho National Park, have yielded yet another major scientific discovery – this time unearthing a strange phallus-shaped creature.

A study to be published online in the journal Nature on March 13 confirms Spartobranchus tenuis is an acorn worm. Acorn worms are marine animals that belong to the phylum hemichordates, a group which is closely related to today’s sea stars and sea urchins. While Spartobranchus tenuis is long extinct, other species of acorn worms thrive in the fine sands and mud of deep and shallow waters in present day ecosystems.

“Unlike animals with teeth and bones, these spaghetti-shaped creatures were soft-bodied, so the fossil record for them is extremely scarce,” said lead author Dr. Jean-Bernard Caron, Associate Professor of Earth Sciences and Ecology & Evolutionary biology at the University of Toronto and Curator of Invertebrate Palaeontology at the Royal Ontario Museum. “Our analysis of Spartobranchus tenuis, a creature previously unknown to science, pushes the fossil record of the enteropneusts back by 200 million years and fundamentally changes our understanding of evolution from this period.”

Since their discovery in the 19th-century, some of the biggest questions in hemichordate evolution have focused on the group’s origins and the relationship between its two main branches: the enteropneusts and pterobranchs. Enteropneusts and pterobranchs look very different, yet share many genetic and developmental characteristics that reveal an otherwise unexpected close relationship.
“Spartobranchus tenuis represents a crucial missing link that serves not only to connect the two main hemichordate groups but helps to explain how an important evolutionary transformation was achieved,” added Caron. “Our study suggests that primitive enteropneusts developed a tubular structure – the smoking gun – which has been retained over time in modern pterobranchs.”

Hemichordates also share many of the same characteristics as chordates – a group of animals that includes humans – with the name hemichordate roughly translating to ‘half a chordate.’

Spartobranchus tenuis probably fed on small particles of matter at the bottom of the oceans. “There are literally thousands of specimens at the Walcott Quarry in Yoho National Park, so it’s possible Spartobranchus tenuis may have played an important role in recycling organic matter in the early Burgess Shale environment, similar to the ecological service provided by earth worms today on land,” said Caron.

Detailed analysis suggests Spartobranchus tenuis had a flexible body consisting of a short proboscis, collar and narrow elongate trunk terminating in a bulbous structure, which may have served as an anchor. The largest complete specimens examined were ten centimetres long with the proboscis accounting for about half a centimetre. A large proportion of these worms was preserved in tubes, of which some were branched, suggesting the tubes were used as a dwelling structure.
Other members of the Spartobranchus tenuis research team are Simon Conway Morris of the University of Cambridge and Christopher B. Cameron of the Université de Montréal. Last year Conway Morris and Caron published a well-publicized study on Pikaia, believed to be one of the planet’s first human relatives.

The Burgess Shale is found in Yoho National Park, part of the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks World Heritage Site, and is one of the most important fossil deposits for understanding the origin and early evolution of animals that took place during the Cambrian Explosion starting about 542 million years ago.